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Last week, Harry Belafonte delivered a lecture entitled “Activism and
Racial Justice in America.” Sponsored by Stanford University’s African and African-American
Studies Department and its director, H. Samy Ali, a noted hip-hop authority, Belafonte
delivered the annual St. Clair Drake Memorial lecture to a crowd of
undergraduate and graduate students packed into the Business School Auditorium. Angela Davis delivered the
2012 St. Clair Drake Memorial
lecture named for Stanford’s first Black Studies director. At the age of 87,
Harry Belafonte has been getting a lot of news coverage for many of his recent
comments and criticisms. And those who attended Belafonte’s Stanford lecture in
hopes of hearing something controversial were not disappointed. Early on in his
lecture, the New York-born Jamaican proudly announced that he and the other
leaders of his generation were responsible for the significant achievements of
the civil rights era. Then after boasting that “We won every battle,” the legendary
entertainer raised more than a few eyebrows by blaming the students in his
audience for losing all that was gained by such radicals as Martin Luther Ling,
Jr, Malcom X, Paul Robeson, Rosa Parks and W.E.B. DuBois.

“Through
their inattention and greed,” Belafonte said, “members of the current
post-racial generation have squandered the precious gift of civil rights, and
especially voting rights, that was passed to them by my generation.”

Belafonte
continued by lecturing his audience of graduate and undergraduate students
about the radical thinking that used “non-violent” confrontation and “love” as
a means of achieving political goals. “Radical thinking is what allowed us to
successfully challenge white racism and end discrimination,” Belafonte boasted.
“By becoming radical thinkers, we won every battle.” Belafonte asserted that
white racism was unable to withstand the power of their moral authority and,
therefore, capitulated. Then Belafonte issued a challenge. “So because you were
inattentive, the Koch Brothers and other neo-con billionaires have taken away
your civil rights, the rights that we won for you. And, now, I want to know
what you’re going to do about it?”

I was
surprised that, even though loaded down with predatory student loans and facing
a hostile job market, the youthful audience seemed willing to accept
Belafonte’s unfair and blatantly false accusation. One black PhD candidate even
asked the singer/actor for guidance in adopting the type of radical thinking that
Belafonte claimed was missing in the current generation. “After I graduate,”
the student said, “I’ll be paying off student loans while supporting myself.
What do you suggest that I do to be relevant and still survive?” Though
Belafonte rambled for ten minutes, he could offer no satisfactory response to the
question.

Of
course not. The student’s question was real and Belafonte’s lecture was theatre
and not to be taken seriously. When he claimed that civil rights ‘won every
battle,’ it was like the Nazis claiming that Richard Wagner’s operas were actual
German history. When Belafonte challenges his youthful audience to follow in
the footsteps of heroic civil rights activists and reject the practice of greed
and excessive individualism, he poses a false dilemma. Neither of Belafonte’s
depictions are real. The venerable actor gave a great performance but his
historical rendition was false. In reality, the black leadership in today’s
post-racial era is identical to the Negro leadership of the civil rights era. Black
leadership of any era takes its orders from their white sponsors. Belafonte well
knows that anyone truly advocating rights for black people will be subjected to
ostracism, deprivation and incarceration; this is as true today as it was
during the civil rights era.

For
centuries, Europeans ‘bled’ their patents to cure illnesses and diseases. Physicians
recommended the bloodletting and barbers, the actual surgeons, performed the
procedure. When Harry Belafonte described how heroic civil rights leaders “won
every battle” and regaled the students with stories of non-violence and love for
white racists, he is like someone arguing that draining the blood of a seriously
ill patient is an effective cure. “Non-violence” is nothing new. It has been
taught ever since slaves began burning down their masters’ homes in the 1600s.
At the time, slave masters recruited preachers to teach blacks to behave “non-violently.”
For centuries, Europeans bled their patients and blacks loved their masters. Non-violence
and bloodletting are both fatal to their practitioners. So the most generous
evaluation of Belafonte’s “we won them all” statement is that he was probably
in a recording studio or on a movie set while black people were being “bled.”

The former
civil rights era was no different than the current post-racial era. America’s agenda,
then as now, is the indiscriminate murder and the mass incarceration of black
people. [Just as America’s international policy is the overthrowing of regimes,
the plundering of resources and the killing of non-white peoples.] To advance
their agenda, white folks use American institutions to subject the black
community to racial profiling, economic deprivation and police oppression. [see:93-Year-Old Black Woman Fatally Shot by
Texas Officerhttp://www.dallasweekly.com/news/national/article_65b1415e-d6d3-11e3-8627-0017a43b2370.html]Miseducation, otherwise known as propaganda,
is the key element in transporting black youth along the school to prison
pipeline. As recently as 2011, studies show that less than 3% of blacks
graduating from high school could read above the basic level, meaning that they
can neither obtain, comprehend or apply any information that will help them
improve their personal or group circumstances. The most important element in America’s
racist agenda, however, is the active participation of a complacent, cowardly
and corrupt black leadership. These people were chosen specifically because
they would do as they were told.

The “mass
incarceration” of black people has reached genocidal proportions. Accelerated
by the government’s phony War On Drugs,
black people have been arrested and incarcerated at rate 537 times more than
white people. In her book, The New Jim
Crow, Michelle Alexander claims that the mass incarcerations began in the
1980s with Ronald Reagan. Mass incarcerations actually began in the 1950s with
Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact, as outlined in Gunnar Myrdal’s blueprint for
genocide, An American Dilemma, the
civil rights movement preceded the War On
Drugs as a means of identifying and incarcerating thousands of young black
people. During the numerous sit-ins, marches and demonstrations called by Belafonte’s
‘heroic’ civil rights leadership, thousands of blacks were incarcerated but,
unlike the preachers and civil rights leaders who made bail, the thousands
incarcerated were never released. The
civil rights leaders called for children to be beaten, hosed and bitten by
dogs. The civil rights leaders called for children to be shot and bombed. But
when the thousands were incarcerated and their parents lost their jobs and their
families lost their homes, the civil rights leaders, receiving the gratitude of
whites for their ‘love’, moved on. The thousands remained incarcerated, because,
despite Belafonte’s mythology, ‘love’ did not win over a single white racist.

The
actual facts surrounding the civil rights era are far different than the myths Harry
Belafonte and others like to tell. For example, when the three civil rights
workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in
Oxford, Mississippi in 1964, Lyndon Johnson wanted answers and arrests.
President Johnson was not an advocate of “non-violence.” So J. Edgar Hoover hired
Mafia “hit men” to kidnap and “interrogate” local members of Ku Klux Klan.
These interrogations led to the discovery of the murdered civil rights worker’s
bodies and the arrest and conviction of their murderers. So much for Harry
Belafonte’s out of the box, radical thinking. In fact, Lyndon Johnson and
others orchestrated the entire civil rights movement for their own purposes. Handpicked
Negroes were put in positions to do the bidding of someone who wanted to be re-elected
president and to pursue a war in Indo-China. Truly radical black thinkers in
organizations such as the Deacons For Defense, the Republic For New Africa, the
African Blood Brotherhood, the Black Panther Party, Black Student Unions and
the Black Muslims were incarcerated and assassinated. And when the handpicked
Negro, Martin Luther King, Jr, got out of line, he suffered the fate of any
other “radical” nigger at the hands of the FBI, CIA and US Army according to
William Pepper’s book, An Act Of State.
The truth of the matter is that black leadership has always been chosen for its
cowardice and ignorance. Negro leaders during the civil rights era behaved no
differently than today’s FBI snitches like Al Sharpton, coons like Allen West and
entertainers like Harry Belafonte.